Wear of artificial denture teeth by use of toothbrushes. Part 1: Abrasive wear of anterior teeth.

High-strength denture teeth (HS teeth) were developed in order to improve the hardness and wear resistance of conventional plastic denture teeth (PL teeth), while retaining their feature of easy occlusal adjustment. The objective of this study was to evaluate the abrasive wear resistance of HS teeth. We conducted wear tests and measured surface roughness using six types of anterior artificial teeth, i.e., three types of HS teeth and three types of PL teeth, the latter serving as the control. The results of the toothbrush abrasion test revealed that the HS teeth had about 5 times greater wear resistance than the PL teeth. It was also found that the type of artificial teeth and the number of abrasive wear-testing strokes had a significant (P less than 0.05) influence on the surface roughness of artificial teeth.